After lo these many years of being chronically online, I experienced what can only be described as a catastrophic uptick in online popularity, and I was woefully unprepared for the attentiveness this incident would require of me.
In Week 1’s essay, I discussed what recording new music would mean for my ability to positively engage with my first album, Ageless, and how grinding it to a pulp on social media provided a sort of severance, whereas time would need to elapse before I could appreciate the music for what it was. At present, Ageless feels like a box of tattered rags I don’t have the energy to sift through for non-perishables before donating to some sinister non-profit like Goodwill.
The uptick came party to a sense of excruciating seclusion. In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, I transitioned an Instagram account I normally reserved for sharing dispassionate, 35mm photos of lighthouses, which I’d taken on my mission to see every lighthouse in the U.S., to controversial, politically-charged reels. Initially, I saw my follower count dip. Mostly, the downward trend came from people from my hometown in Montana, and mostly, I felt like, “Good riddance.” But there was an ineptitude that settled in, taking me back to a point in time when I struggled to relate to my high school classmates, and as a result, became, more or less, hostile towards them and towards the concept of high school itself.
As a result, I, perhaps egotistically determined to build up my follower count (I’ll show you!), let out a battle cry I can’t confidently say belonged to anyone other than my younger self, horribly misunderstood as she was by people she didn’t want to be understood by. But I guess that’s the pathology of social media, high school, and the world at large—if we want to be so impudent.
Whether purely altruistic or not, it worked. In a matter of weeks, my audience quadrupled. I had never felt so visible in the online world. It was a terrifying responsibility.
This all happened as I set out, once again, for Richmond, where I had begun recording my second album in August. I started my trip in a bed and breakfast near Point Lookout on the Chesapeake Bay, and in the three days I spent leading up to the studio, I finished seeing every lighthouse in Maryland. All the while, I churned out as much content as possible to keep the online momentum going. It was an exhausting venture.
By the time I got to the studio, the novelty of my social media pluming had worn off. My hands felt poisoned for all the time I’d spent on my phone liking, responding, and sometimes deleting comments. What was once a mostly manageable and customary addiction to social media felt totally out of control. My brain had gotten so used to this new drug, and I began to fear a time when my social media wasn’t growing like an aggressive cancer.
The studio wasn’t the remedy I hoped. In fact, being that my producer and I tended to trade off contributing to the tracks, there were long periods when he sat at the desk, working, and I was totally out of it, furiously arguing with Facebook bigots I couldn’t even be certain were real people.
I can’t say whether the music suffered because of this mania, but I can say that there was not a single morning I showed up well-rested. I managed to work out, I managed to eat well, I even managed a walk or two. But I was easily frustrated. I lacked the capacity for the mundane road bumps any jaunt in the studio would bring, especially with two minds who understand momentum and rhythm in two completely different ways.
For all intents and purposes, it was just as it was before. I overbought produce at the grocery store I pretended I would cook, I watched comfort movies on the living room TV while I did my skincare, I never got to bed earlier than one AM and I complained about it in my journal. But everything was different. I had been imagining a great movement like this for twelve years, and suddenly it was here.
I was grateful and strung out.
The three songs we chose were inherently political. It was purposeful. The energy I’d gained online would’ve been wasted on the more downtempo songs I’d written about happiness and my relationship. I was furious at the state of things, and the timeliness of that was something to call upon.
We took a break over the weekend. I spent one day watching the Twilight series and the other seeing my 400th U.S. lighthouse, and my final lighthouse in Virginia. In the car to Stingray Point I set up my camera to address my new audience. I told them how relieved I was that fall had arrived. True fall. With its crisp, dry air. I hadn’t realized until that first morning, when the ground looked dewy and the sky was white and cold, how fearsome I’d become of a perpetual, humid hellscape. I told the camera, “As I was sitting there this summer, weathering hot day after hotter day after even hotter day, I realized I’m experiencing my future right now.”
This might seem off topic, but I wanted to offer a look into the artist’s brain as the artist endeavors to create. I was sitting with an enormous amount of panic. I was working in the studio wondering about the end of the world, and how everything I had made would go out with it. I showed up optimistically in sweaters and winter coats, only to step out in the midday sun and long for short sleeves. I sat at Stella’s bar in conversation with a man who hated AI but was employed by a construction firm in the business of building data centers. There is so much to account for, and I was exhausted by it all, by the mammoth feelings I had and the implausibility of ever being able to sort through them.
I had started to entertain the idea that I may never accomplish everything I want to. I have myriad dormant ideas and projects, so many millions of ways I could imagine expressing myself, and so, only recently, I started to really appreciate the ideas that made their way through the fold. It was a grand triumph to hear these songs in the studio speakers as we speckled them with arpeggiators, drums, and bells. Sitting there in my overwhelm, I understood these works to be representatives of the collective, of all my ideas and hopes, and that what I could do was honor all the music and words that may never make it into the domain by pouring myself into what had as though this album, alone, could set the rest of them free.
I was relieved to wrap these three songs when we did. Our final day in the studio was spent, in part, making up for our first day, which saw me at my most strained. I had suggested an early night so I could go back to my Airbnb and create more content. I did a lot of self-battering that evening. I was there to work, not argue online and fight for a universal understanding between me and people who were unreachable, and especially in the comment section of some silly post that had “broken through.” Over the next few days, I tried to be gentle, to remind myself that it was okay to be a little caught up in the hysteria. Eventually, this would become a normal part of life, and I would cease to be this impacted.
My final morning, I managed a walk to the coffee shop before driving to the airport in D.C. I was lax as I drove along the highways, through the trees, and eventually the Potomac River. It was a beautiful, wintry day.
